by Voltaire
5. The distinction between growing personal assertion and lack of cultural sophistication is adumbrated by Haydn Mason. ‘Candide achieves personal autonomy,’ ‘he is his own master at last’ (53, 92); but he exhibits ‘a continuing naïveté on the level of abstract reflection,’ ‘he continues [to be cheated] as naïvely as ever’ (84, 90): ‘Candide’: Optimism Demolished (New York: Twayne, 1992).
6. Both senses appear in Pierre Cambou, ‘Le héros du conte voltairien: sa genèse dans les Œuvres historiques,’ Littératures 23 (1990), 89–101. Of the ‘héros … de conception lockienne’ in the tales he says ‘il bâtit une science nouvelle’ (98), yet refers in his conclusion to ‘le point de vue réducteur du héros’ (101).
7. ‘Il lui arrive encore d’osciller entre l’espérance et la noire mélancholie,… mais on le sent dans la bonne voie,’ says Van den Heuvel (n. 1 here, 835). Pearson (n. 2 here) makes no specific reference to them, but in effect transcribes the problem by saying both that ‘Candide seeks to think more independently’ (117) and that ‘Candide is unable to judge safely for himself’ (118).
8. William F. Bottiglia, despite his general resistance to psychologising, offers this explanation: ‘Candide’: Analysis of a Classic, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 7A (1964), 170ff.
9. That Candide actually becomes more selfish is part of the revisionist reading of Candide by Roy S. Wolper, who sees the protagonist of this and of other tales as targets for Voltaire’s satire rather than his messengers. See ‘Candide: gull in the garden,’ Eighteenth Century Studies 3 (1969), 265–77. Wolper’s salutary but overly sweeping approach is discussed in commentaries by Vivienne Mylne and Theodore E. D. Braun in SVEC 212 (1982), 312–30.
10. ‘Numerous inconsistencies […] make him less of a type’: Douglas A. Bonneville. Voltaire and the Form of the Novel, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 158 (1974), 54. ‘Continually the characters in Candide do or say surprising things which run counter to the expectations which their name, class, nationality or literary ancestor may lead us to entertain, thus forcing us to recognise them as real people who are not easily categorized, as human beings not ciphers’: Pearson (n. 2 here), 130. The latter is really a very strange statement.
11. It is notable that, although Pangloss is present in the story in only eight chapters out of the thirty of Candide (1, 4–6 and 27–30), his name appears in twenty-six of the thirty. See Pierre R. and Marie-Paule Ducretet, Voltaire: ‘Candide’—étude quantitative. Dictionnaire de fréquence, index verborum et concordance (Toronto, 1974).
12. Because he fails to understand that one may not simply walk out of the army (‘il s’avisa’ is not of course an index of Candide’s inner life, but an ironic signal to us), he exposes—metaphorically, and literally on his body—its underlying violence. Because he fails to understand that sectarianism is more important than another simple human expectation (‘Je manque de pain’), he brings out the limits of Christian charity. And so forth.
13. An extract from Paquette’s account of her present life provides a nice example. ‘Etre souvent réduite à emprunter une jupe pour aller se la faire lever par un homme dégôutant’ (24) comically foregrounds the particular yet aphoristically summarises the whole. The satiric wit and the global judgement alike are manifestly beyond the competence of the fictional ‘character,’ and they take us beyond her fictional situation.
14. The famous description of a battle as ‘cette boucherie héroïque’ (3) offers an example. The narrator pretends not to understand that ‘boucherie’ and ‘héroïque’ belong to incompatible—low and high—registers. By yoking them together he speaks the truth about the battle, with witty and epigrammatic force.
15. The writer also fails to understand, it appears, how narrative of any kind should be written. Minor inconsistencies include the climatic change from outdoor weather in chapter 1 to snow in chapter 2, and the irreconciliability of Cunégonde’s chronology in chapter 8 with Candide’s (see Magnan [n. 2 here], 81–2). Absurdities include Candide’s familiarity with the Journal de Trévoux (16) and with Milton (25). Need we mention such broader infractions of the rules as the telescoping of contemporary historical events, or the survival of protagonists who are repeatedly killed? We should however recall the narrator’s joky ‘je crois’ (chapter 1)—foregrounding and ironising at the start the convention of narratorial omniscience.
16. In particular, ‘rendundancy abound[s] in Candide’: Carol Sherman, Reading Voltaire’s ‘Contes’: A Semiotics of Philosophical Narration (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Department of Romance Languages, 1985), 272.
17. Probably the best accounts of Candide as the mock-epic of mankind are: Patrick Henry, ‘Sacred and profane gardens in Candide,’ SVEC 176 (1979), 133–53; and Jean-Marie Apostolidès, ‘Le système des échanges dans Candide,’ Poétique 48 (1981), 449–59.
18. Having affirmed that the satiric voice of ‘Voltaire’ pervades the voices of all the main characters, we may go on to propose the obverse. Their quest for meaning, and the differing holistic accounts of the world that are assigned them (to Martin and Pangloss too, to La Vieille and Pococurante, and—radically unstable—to Candide) are exercises in self-irony by Voltaire.
19. Gustave Lanson in his excellent brief account of the Contes sees the characters in Candide as ‘fantoches,’ but finds in the conclusion a call to practical action: Voltaire (Paris, 1906), 152–53. Nearly a century later, Roger Pearson as we have noted takes the opposed positions: Candide learns, but the conclusion is open and ambiguous.
20. See the Introduction to René Pomeau’s edition of Candide (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1980), 76–78.
21. Not until the late 1960s did Candide appear in an edition for schools, in France or in England: Pomeau, ed. cit., 79. Jean Sareil, ‘Le massacre de Voltaire dans les manuels scolaires,’ SVEC 212 (1982), 83–161, claims that the Contes were widely deprecated until 1945 if not 1965 (125–30). André Magnan (who writes from the opposite position from Sareil, not to approve but to attack the increasing integration of Candide into the literary institution) dates the ‘promotion’ of the Contes back to the nineteenth century, but agrees that it was accompanied by moral disapproval until the 1960s. Indeed, he points out that two extracts from Candide in the classic student manual by Lagarde et Michard (XVIIIe Siècle) appeared in bowdlerised form until as recently as 1985: Voltaire: ‘Candide’ ou l’optimisme (1st n. 2 above), 110–15.
JAMES J. LYNCH
Romance Conventions in Voltaire’s Candide†
Source studies of Voltaire’s Candide are in such general agreement about the romanesque background of the conte that the very idea of a fresh view seems impertinent.1 Most critics are content to say that Voltaire either compresses or parodies conventions common to the general romance tradition: separations of lovers, surprising and improbable accidents while one lover pursues the other, and a wish-fulfilling reunion at the end of the novel. While it is easy enough to recognize the general romanesque parody in the story, unless one has a more specific knowledge of how romance conventions function in a serious context, it is difficult to see the comic use Voltaire makes of those conventions. I propose to define Voltaire’s burlesque of the romance tradition by comparing Candide to one tradition of seventeenth-century romance, the Heliodoran novel. By no means is this tradition the only one Voltaire may have known and by no means does it embrace all of the romance elements in Candide. Nevertheless, it is useful for comparison because the Heliodoran tradition results from a desire to refine and make regular earlier traditions of romance. By comparing Candide to the Heliodoran novel, we will be able to identify the unifying romance structure of the novel and parodic romance elements in the characters of Candide and Cunégonde.
I call this tradition the Heliodoran novel because its principal influence is Heliodorus’s post-cl
assical Greek novel, the Aethiopica—a work rediscovered in 1526 and first translated into the vernacular by Jacques Amyot in 1547.2 By the end of the sixteenth century, the Aethiopica had won critical praises from such theorists as Tasso, Scaliger, and El Pinciano (Forcione 49–87). To them, Heliodorus’s novel was the prototype of the epic in prose because it possessed the unity and verisimilitude which chivalric novels lacked. During the sixteenth century, it influenced a variety of novels, including Alonso Nuñez’s Clareo y Florisea (1552) and Montemayor’s Diana (1559) in Spain, Sidney’s Arcadia (1590) in England, and Chappuys’s translation of the Amadis (1581) and Ollenix du Mont Sacré’s Oeuvre de la Chastété (1595–99) in France (Sandy 102–20).
In the first half of the seventeenth century, the Aethiopica became even more widely associated with literary theories about the prose epic. Cervantes’s Canon of Toledo, although he does not actually cite Heliodorus in his discourse on romances, recapitulates the arguments of Tasso, Scaliger, and El Pinciano (Forcione 91). Indeed, Cervantes’s final novel, Persiles y Sigismunda (1617) in many ways attempts to create the kind of ideal romance that the Canon envisioned; it is a work that the author himself claimed “dares to compete with Heliodorus” (Novelas 100). In seventeenth-century France, the Aethiopica influenced the heroic novels of Gomberville, La Calprenède, and particularly de Scudéry, who cites the Aethiopica as a source in the prefaces to both the Ibrahim and the Grand Cyrus. By the time Pierre-Daniel Huet wrote his treatise on the origin of the novel in 1670, the association of the Aethiopica with the prose epic had become so much a part of literary theory that he calls Heliodorus “the Homer of the novel” (78).
Although individual works in the Heliodoran tradition (such as the Persiles, the Ibrahim, and the Grand Cyrus) differ dramatically among themselves, they share a common aesthetic theory and a common narrative structure. Because the Heliodoran novel is a synthesis of romance and epic, it strives for a balance between unity and diversity, verisimilitude and the marvelous, instruction and delight. After the fashion of verse epics, these novels typically begin in medias res—a narrative decision that produces suspense and provides a unified framework within which the authors can introduce diverse and marvelous accidents conventional to romance in general. The plot typically consists of a journey of two lovers who are betrothed, but whose marriage is prevented by some problem of identity. They travel to a specific destination, usually the center of their civilization; there the impediments to their marriage are removed, and they wed. In the Aethiopica and the Persiles, the lovers disguise themselves as brother and sister, but in all of the Heliodoran novels, either the hero or the heroine assumes a different identity. In the Ibrahim, for instance, Justinian is forced to assume the name Ibrahim at the court of Soliman; in the Grand Cyrus, Cyrus assumes the name Artamène in order to mask his real identity in the court of Cyaxare.
The journey itself, which typically comprises the bulk of the novel, consists of the kind of adventures we think of as romanesque: separations, shipwrecks, enslavements, abductions, apparent deaths, miraculous resurrections, apparent infidelities, and tender reconciliations. These accidents are unified because they are connected to the principal event of the novel—the marriage of the lovers—but they also provide the expansiveness characteristic of both romance and epic. Moreover, the loosely unified format of the novels allows room for stylistic embellishment. Separations often prompt lengthy rhetorical complaints and stylized descriptions of absent lovers. Reunions prompt recitals of offstage action that recreate in miniature the suspense of the larger plot line. The various companions met on the journey give way to interlaced histories which often mirror the providential schema on which the novel as a whole is based.
In the last half of the seventeenth century, when prose fiction turns away from the stylized conventions of the heroic novels, the Heliodoran tradition as a distinctive literary influence ceases. Indeed, it becomes part of the generally indiscriminate romance background of the novel. Nevertheless, its distinctive features emerge in Candide, almost as a unified romance thread that generates expectations which are comically thwarted by the end of the novel.
There is no evidence that Voltaire had the Aethiopica especially in mind while writing Candide. He did own a French translation of it, however, and according to his correspondence he was at least familiar with the Grand Cyrus.3 In addition, there were at least six French editions of the Persiles before 1759 (Stegmann 229). I suggest the Heliodoran novel tradition not as a source, but as a paradigm of literary romance. I will use it as an analytical model by which we can identify particular romance conventions in the conte and see how Voltaire shatters both Candide’s and our expectations for a best of all possible endings.
Parallels with the Heliodoran form can be found both in the larger structure of Candide and in several minor episodes. One of these minor episodes—Candide’s meeting with Don Ferdinando d’Ibaraa in chapter 13—provides a useful starting point, for here the hero is placed in a romance role he is incapable of playing.
After Candide’s and Cunégonde’s arrival in Buenos Aires, Don Ferdinando lustfully inquires about the hero’s relationship with the heroine. Having a spirit that was “trop pure pour trahir la vérité,” Candide is flustered but unable to tell the polite lie that Cunégonde is his wife or his sister (165–66) [28].4 His inability to lie reminds us of his persistent naivete, but the narrator’s parenthetical observation suggests a displacement of romance convention. He observes that the kind of lie Candide avoids was “très à la mode chez les anciens et … pût être utile aux modernes” (165). Morize (74–75) and Pomeau (165) explain this comment as an allusion to Abraham’s disguise as Sarah’s brother. Yet the juxtaposition of “ancient” and “modern” suggests a literary context as well as a biblical one; it points toward the expedient lies told by romance heroes and heroines in order to protect their identities and to deceive their assailants. Indeed, disguise and the accompanying lies are central to the Heliodoran novel, for its unity and suspense depend upon our recognizing that the lovers’ real identities will eventually be unmasked.5 By indicating that such lies were “très à la mode chez les anciens,” Voltaire gently criticizes romance conventionality. But by adding that such a lie might also be “utile aux modernes,” he suggests that such lies—even if conventional—are more practical than Candide’s naive allegiance to truth. The parenthesis, in short, signals the intersection of romance and realism that can be found throughout the novel.
When we look at the larger elements of form, we can draw even more ironic parallels between Candide and the Heliodoran novel. As in the Heliodoran tradition, Candide and Cunégonde fall in love despite her father’s and, later, her brother’s objections; they are both separated, reunited, and they begin a journey during which they are once again separated. At the end, they are finally reunited and married. But while the separations in the Heliodoran novel are designed to create suspense, the two separations in Candide seem real. We have no reason to doubt that Cunégonde has been killed by the Bulgars and no reason to expect the hero and heroine to be reunited after their separation in Buenos Aires—that is, of course, until Candide sets off on his quest for the heroine after the Eldorado episode.
In the Heliodoran novel the journey of lovers usually has thematic as well as narrative significance, which is one reason that it became the model for the epic in prose. For example, in the Aethiopica Theagenes and Chariclea journey from the barbarous lands of the Nile delta southward to Meroë, the capital of Ethiopia, where the heroine is revealed to be the daughter of the king and queen. There, too, the hero and heroine are finally able to marry. Similarly, in the Persiles Periandro and Auristela journey from the barbarous North (where Christianity had strayed from the true faith) to Rome, the seat of Roman Catholic civilization. This geographical movement enacts a Counter-Reformation journey of man; Auristela, having been instructed in the true faith at Rome, recovers her religious birthright, in effect, and is thus able to marry Periandro. The journey in Ca
ndide is similar, although it is geographically and thematically different. Starting off in Germany—a Germany barbarously overrun with Bulgars, in fact—the lovers journey to the New World, back to Europe and finally to Constantinople. It is an epic that almost traces the progress of western civilization in reverse and brings the hero and heroine to a qualified, if not disputable, happiness. A disillusioned Candide and a prematurely aged Cunégonde end up on a small, impoverished farm near the seat of a faded empire.
Although the journey in Candide generally resembles that of the Heliodoran tradition, the narrative is significantly different from works such as the Aethiopica and the Persiles that begin in medias res. Voltaire’s arrangement is chronological from the start and thus follows the realistic pattern of such quasi-picaresque novels as Fielding’s Tom Jones. In the Heliodoran tradition, the in medias res opener signals a connection with the epic tradition (and thereby legitimizes its claim to be art), but, more importantly, it provides a unified framework thought to be absent in earlier romances. Jacques Amyot, one of the first Renaissance commentators on Heliodorus, noted that the epic style opener links the chronological start of Theagenes’s and Chariclea’s history with the beginning of the Aethiopica and then establishes “an ingenious liaison” between that beginning and the “long-awaited joy” one experiences at the end. The followers of Heliodorus in the seventeenth century used the in medias res opener with such regularity that it no doubt appeared to eighteenth-century writers such as Voltaire merely another romance improbability. By choosing a chronological ordering, Voltaire thus follows a typical eighteenth-century pattern of subordinating romance elements to a realistic structure. In Candide as well as in such chronologically structured novels as Tom Jones, the journey itself takes on romance characteristics once the historical setting is established.6